From the Geocaching Guide to the Game link, with my additional commentary related to these so-called Challenges (like kissing a picture of a frog in your kitchen or burping toward St. Paul):

Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor (*NO*) treasure hunting game (*NO*) using GPS-enabled devices (*NO*). Participants navigate (*NO*) to a specific set of GPS coordinates (*NO*) and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location (...let me think: *NO*).

If you go to a traditional cache that you have done you get the total including the challenge caches, but in your profile you see a total without the challenge caches. Confusing. Which number do you go by for a milestone cache like say #3,000, do you include the challenge caches or not.

If you go to a traditional cache that you have done you get the total including the challenge caches, but in your profile you see a total without the challenge caches. Confusing. Which number do you go by for a milestone cache like say #3,000, do you include the challenge caches or not.

At least today you don't have to worry about challenges, since the geocaching website is either non-responsive or unworkably slow. Speculation on the various fora/Facebook etc is that the 'update' (or downdate) this week has slowed everything down - and with the avatars, bar graphs, and other overbuilt new features to load, that speculation seems reasonable to me. Can't find anything from Groundspeak addressing the slowdown, either.

In a recent post, Jeremy said he is not a businessman at heart. Well, it's probably time he hired one.

At first I was excited about the "something-like" virtuals that were coming. Then when I saw what Challenges were, I was disappointed. Over the next day or so I started coming around to them a bit.

But the fact that you can't edit a challenge you've created once someone accepts it, the fact that people can create identical/similar/muitiple challenges at the same spot, and the fact that there are only mob-rule quality-control factors in place, have left me nonplussed. The overall sense I get is that the whole thing just wasn't very well thought out.

I've enjoyed creating some challenges, and I was thinking that I'll create a second account to log any.

But more and more I've been realizing that Challenges aren't aimed at geocachers. The app is listed in the Social Networking category, which I think says a lot. Challenges are aimed at broadening the customer base for Groundspeak and drawing in the FourSquare/CheckIn/SocialApp crowd. Which is fine, but in the end I'm not sure I want another activity to do on top of Geocaching. I might do one or two interesting ones now and then, but I think that's about it.

The app is easy enough to use that I will probably logfind complete them as a secondary thing, if I'm near one and feel like I want a little change-up in my day. For instance, we go to the Science Museum once in a while, so TecGeoJim's Challenge down there will be a nice addition.

Interestingly, the API is up and running fine, so mobile apps that use the API have been working all day, despite the main site's implosion.

My family and I completed 4 challenges today. To be honest, we had a lot of fun. I am not really worried about them not being considered "real finds". We put a lot more energy and effort into "completing" them then finding some caches. The 4 we found today, were not different than the original virtuals. Those that I feel are not worthy of completing I will thumbs down and not complete.
Someone I know is not a huge fan of geocaching, and today they went with us and had a good time completing "challenges".

Not so much a fan of the worldwide challenges. Geocaching should be about going somewhere (specific) and exploring our world. Kissing a frog is not that. I didn't do it. My 2 cents.

My family and I completed 4 challenges today. To be honest, we had a lot of fun.

I spent time this weekend completing several challenges, and creating my own, and I agree with Mayberryman, we had a lot of fun doing them... that being said, we didn't do any locationless ones, we did ones we had to go to physical places like statues and take our photo at that location doing something.

My only irritant with the system is two fold, 1, I can't disable/archive my challenge, and 2) someone didn't complete my challenge (they posted a photo that didn't satisfy the requirements) and there is no way for me to remove their log

My only irritant with the system is two fold, 1, I can't disable/archive my challenge

I was like, "Dude, you've been doing too many pine tree nanos! There is a button right there to archive challenges you've created!"

But I just checked, and now the button's ... gone. You're right. I can't archive a challenge I've created. I wonder why they took that away? Maybe a lot of people were archiving challenges they created?